Friday, April 13, 2007

Kennedy Sidestep Part 1: Avondale

In order to get from Logan Square to work in Rolling Meadows I can take the Kennedy Expressway to the Northwest Tollway (woo boy does wikipedia have this stuff covered these days). And that will take about 30 minutes in light traffic. However, morning traffic often leads me to sidestep most of the Kennedy, following its diagonal path along Milwaukee and then Higgins Avenues to get on it at Nagle. I don't have enough of a Chicago readership that writing this is going to clog that route tomorrow morning. But when it's flowing you can probably average 30 miles per hour including traffic lights.

Tuesday morning I was averaging somewhat less than 30 mph, stopping to shoot sights along the way that I have been mentally cataloging for a while. Not only is this route a time and frustration saver, but it's a main artery through some cool old Chicago neighborhoods. I'll show you some of what I got in the next few days, in geographic order. Follow the image links to flickr and click the (map) link after "Taken in Chicago, Illinois" which is the first bullet under Additional Information for each photo. Or look at the geotagged map of the set of photos. The locations are approximate, but I think they're fairly close to accurate.

This first one is a pet store on Milwaukee north of Diversey. I took another shot of it I like, but thought this one called out slightly stronger to be featured on the blog. The other photo advertises the store's ninja turtles (!) and shows the pretty cool mural they have out front. This neighborhood is called Avondale. It's pretty diverse, but includes the area called Jackowo, or "Polish Village" to you if you thought that was pronounced jack-oh-whoa. You bet you can get some pretty awesome sausage around here. I highly recommend Endy's Deli.

Oh and hey today is my final guest post for the St. Louis CDPB. Check it out for a novel Arch perspective.